Half Of A Yellow Sun

I just finished a very good book - Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

It follows the lives of group of people in Nigeria in the late sixties as civil war divides the country and Biafra attempts to secede.

By turns humorous, sensuous, moving and horrifying - but never less than human, Adichie captures not just the times but draws us into the lives of each of these characters - from Ugwo the laconic but eager houseboy to twin sisters Olanna and Kainene from a wealthy Nigerian family to Odenigbo the zealous academic and Richard Churchill a young Englishman trying to escape his colonial history.

As a boy or 8 or 10 years old, Biafra was the first major world event the seriously entered my consciousness. Don McCullin's terrible pictures from the conflict seared themselves into my memory at that early age - seen in the Observer Sunday Magazine I think, along with the increasing TV and Radio news reports of the suffering and starvation. I can vividly remember collecting some (no doubt small amount of) money to send to the international aid effort.

"This, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, deserves to be nominated for the Booker prize. What is so memorable and accomplished about Half of a Yellow Sun is that political events are never dryly recited; rather they are felt through the medium of lived lives, of actual aching sensitive experiences. To my knowledge it is unusual for a young woman author to capture with such precision and verisimilitude the feelings of a man, but Ugwu is a totally realized character—ambitious, devoted, sexual, scholarly, courageous, uncomplaining, resourceful and intuitive. These characteristics, easy to rattle off, are all dramatized and substantiated in this long and intricate but always compelling narrative. When I think of how many European and American writers rehash the themes of suburban adultery or unhappy childhood, I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate—and we, her readers, are even luckier."
— Edmund White

Adichie has a website here.

(Don McCullin)

Atget in context

(Atget 1924)

One thing about Atget is that his continued use of the same equipment and materials at the end of his career as at the beginning - along with his choice of subject matter - can lead to many of his pictures appearing to be much "older" than they in fact are - or at least appearing to be from an earlier time. In fact, certain obvious exceptions aside, it's frequently hard to tell if an Atget photograph was taken in the 1890's or thirty five or so years later in the mid 1920's. I frequently find that I'm caught out by the date of certain photographs until I check them.

(Atget 1921)

The two Atget photographs above were taken well after the three photographs below by Lartigue. Two of them around 10 -12 years or so later, the other 16-19 years or so earlier.

(Lartigue 1913)

(Lartigue 1911)

(Lartigue 1905)

As well, this last picture by Atget (below) was taken in the same year that Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises:

(Atget 1926)

And finally, all of these photographs where taken several years after Picasso painted his groundbreaking and revolutionary masterpiece Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

Guest Editors - Traces

I need to produce an edit of the current selection I have up from my Traces project (here as well) down to about 15 pictures. Mainly for printing up a selection for some portfolios to go out to various places.

The trouble I often find I am my own worst editor (I think this is true for many photographers - whether they want to admit it or not), so I'm inviting readers here to suggest their edits.

The idea is still to convey the overall feel of the project while picking images that can still carry themselves as individual pictures within the smaller selection.

Now the main practical problem is that on the website it's hard to get the image number unless you hit "zoom" each time and take it from the url. So if you don't want to do that I'm suggesting labelling the columns (four per page) A. to L. with the rows 1 down to 4. So the image above would be B1 (which I realise is a bit cumbersome...)

You can either post in the responses here or email me at timatherton at gmail dot com (or just click on the link down in the right-hand sidebar)

As a minor incentive, if you happen to chose the exact same selection as I end up using I'll send you a signed 11x14 print (okay - I think that's an incentive).



And while I'm sure if thirty people respond I'll get thirty different selections, I'm hoping for a bit of consensus - so knock yourselves out...

thanks



PS - one interesting thing - which isn't exactly news - but you can never quite tell how something is going to look until it's been printed. I've spent a lot of time looking at these pictures in Photoshop - adjusting, cleaning dust spots, sizing etc (as well as looking at the large negs) but the picture above was one I thought was okay but I'd never been that taken by it. Until I printed it up yesterday that is - even at 11x14 it just sings!

Stephen Gill's Hackney

Don'tja just hate it when something like this happens - I'd a got a post for today about Stephen Gill's work all roughed out, some nice quotes etc and then last night Christian Patterson goes and posts nearly the exct same thing... doh

So basically here's a link to Christan's stuff and some info bleow from various book spiels and reviews. I first came across Gill's work through his project and book Hackney Wick (I sure wish I'd bought a copy then) and have been atching what he comes up with next. Each time it's something with a bit of a new twist.

Such as Buried (book here):

"When burying my first batch of photographs, a passing man spotted me and asked what I was doing. Not only did I not want to give the location away of some of my buried pictures, but It just sounded a bit weird to say that I was burying photographs so replied that I was looking for newts. As soon as I’d said that I looked down and saw a newt at my feet."

'The photographs in this book were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there. The amount of time the images were left undergournd varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly.'Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise that I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and collaborating with place - allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture - felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.

Or Hackney Flowers (book):

"Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series. Hackney Flowers has evolved from his series and book Hackney Wick. This times Gill has collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, East London, that were then pressed in his studio and re-photographed alongside his own photographs and found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images extracted from the area.

Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced volume, showing members of the public in Hackney with floral details on their person. This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of colour, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London."

Or Archeology In Reverse (book):

"Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, 'closure'. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away.

Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession... What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones...' - Iain Sinclair.

Continuing to photograph where his award-winning book Hackney Wick left off, Stephen Gill has made Archaeology in Reverse in his cherished area in East London. Still making pictures with the camera he bought at Hackney Wick market for 50p, this time he focuses on things that do not yet exist."

and from Christian Patterson:

"I consider “photographers” to be “artists,” and I often use these two terms interchangeably. Still, there is something to be said for choosing to describe someone as a “photographer,” as an “artist,” or as an “artist who uses photography,” although the latter term is a bit much. It’s very “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” isn’t it?

The photographer Stephen Gill is an artist."

which sums it up prety well I think

Dreams Like This Pt.II

Boy oh boy - some folks certainly work themselves into an awful tizzy about this.

Over on the Landscapist (among other places) we have:

""Different photographers incorporate different approaches, and embrace
or abandon concept and/or narrative to varying degrees, but aside from subject
matter, there is often little else that distinguishes the work ..." (Christian
Patterson)

This notion has been rattling around in my head ever since and it
seems to me that the entire construct is hanging by very precarious thread - the
razor-thin caveat of subject matter aside.
How does one view a picture and set subject matter aside?"

followed by

"In the medium of photography, in which a picture is inexorably linked
with that which it depicts, how does one set aside subject matter?

I believe it is near impossible to do so, especially so re: the
discussion referenced in yesterday's entry, straight photography...

Maybe in the hollowed halls of academia, where the fetish of 'concept'
reigns, subject can be (and is) set aside but isn't that what leads to the
making of pictures that are mostly self-referential academic crap?"

So, I wonder exactly what it was that Tina Modotti is showing us in the top picture here. Only the camera could have seen this slightly surreal scene of the giant peasant overlooking the city. Her eye (and ours if we were stood beside her) simply wouldn't have seen or registered the scene this way. Only the camera could convey it. Of course, Modotti was the very opposite of any kind of inhabitant of the halls of academia - even while she was very much a photographer of ideas.

Then again, on the issue of "setting aside subject matter"

Let's take the humble apple.

Does anyone looking at any of the rest of these pictures scattered through the post seriously think they are about apples? None of them are really about the apparent subject matter, which is essentially incidental... This hasn't been an issue since some time before Van Gogh, so I wonder why photographers seem to cling so desperately to it and feel so threatened that the apparent umbilical chord that they (mistakenly) believe connects them to reality is about to be severed?

To Combine Things Together

I recently came across the work of Jan Stradtman (via Intersecting Images) and especially his collection of work called To Combine Things Together.

I quite like these - the subtle shifts in viewpoint and perspective (as Matt Niebuhr put it tilt/pan/shift). Looking at them is a bit like looking at one of those children's puzzles "find the 8 things that are different between these two pictures".

(note: the effect on the website is better than on blogger)

Before Digital/Dreams Like This

(When We Go After Anything We Get It)

There has been a bit of a storm in a teacup among the photo-blogs recently (which makes me think they are all limited to teacup size really...) in part growing out of an essay by Mike Johnson (who now apparently seems obliged to go on and on about it at length).

(Taking Our Geese to Market)

Some have come out loudly for him

Others against.

(My own limited response - because after a while it just gets terribly, terribly boring - was merely to try and remind people that photographs are essentially about appearances which may often be something rather different than reality. That the belief that "there is a measurable degree of connectedness to the original scene (aka ‘reality’) that some people find important" is a as much a social construct as is any one of the several forms of Renaissance perspective. And that essentially, such arguments as those above simply miss the point withpeople seeing it as an either/or argument with two ends to a spectrum, rather than the fact that throughout the history of photography it has always been a both/and situation:

“Cameras are just boxes for transporting appearances… What is not so simple is to grasp the nature of the appearances which the camera transports. Are they a construction, a man made cultural artifact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace ‘naturally’ left by something that has passed? The answer is, both”. John Berger

(County Fair)

Which is all a rather roundabout way of getting to a recent email I read by the inimitable Luis Gottardi about the very captivating work of William H. Martin (links to details of all the images there) which I had never before encountered:


(The Modern Farmer)

"These masterfully executed "Tall Tale" images by William H. Martin do much more than tell photographic fibs. They subverted the program of photo-as-evidence, while simultaneously mocking themselves.

The fantasies they depict are of a paradaisical land of plenty. A cornucopiary of endless Super-Sized game, crops, bounty, a place where there is enough for no one to ever go hungry or wanting, where every hunter bags his limit, and fishermen stop fishing because their arms are sore from catching Leviathans, a land brimming with flowering life, blessed by God.

Mr. Martin did tell of a dream, a universal human dream that played itself out with every major human movement in history, in this case, under the guise of the "American" variety.

The poignancy lies after the suspension bridge of disbelief's gossamer woven wish cables break, and it collapses, awakening us to the reality. In a sense, these are closely connected to, and yet the opposite of Robert Frank".--- Luis

(Duck Hunting)

"This postcard was sent to Leon Custard of Mendon, Michigan on May 8, 1909. The message on the back asks, "Did you ever have a dream like this?"

And about "When We Go After Anything We Get It":

"One of the most animated of Martin's photomontages, this rollicking rabbit rodeo is convincing because of its attention to detail. The sketched-in ruts beneath the car and the shadow under the humongous hare add an extra dimension of realism. In the sky to the left of the tree is a tiny flying object that appears to be a hat, carried off by the wind."

What is so interesting about all this is that in a way "Dad" Martin was really so much more free to do this - his own thing for his own reasons - than he would be today. There wasn't really the established framework of photographic rights and wrongs and establishment to hinder his choosing to do so.

P.S. When we took our break at the cottage, for the first time my six year old son and I read our way through Alice's Adventures in Wonderland every evening; and in that light, these pictures seem entirely normal...

Gerhard Richter

One of my favourite contemporary artists is Gerhard Richter (his retrospective book Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting of a few years ago is one I leaf through often).

Of course for photographers, one of the intriguing things about Richter is his use of photography in his painting - though that's not the only thing that appeals to me about his work by any means. (Although the first of his paintings which really grabbed me were the very photographic Baader-Meinhof series - which may also in part have been down to personal history with the Red Army Faction and Rote Zora as much as to do with their "photographic" nature...).

Anyway, I happened to come across what appears to be the "official" Gerhard Richter website the other day.

It's absolutely chock full of stuff if you hunt around. One particular interesting thing is that you can click on what he calls his "Atlas". This is all the photographs he takes day by day, year by year, along with cut outs from magazines, maps, notes etc - some of which finds itself as a basis for his later work. And if this is the case, then the work is linked to the Atlas page

I also just saw there is a book based on this Gerhard Richter: Atlas.

"The Atlas is Gerhard Richter's ongoing encyclopedic work. It is comprised of approximately 4,000 images, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on over 600 separate panels.

The images closely parallel, year by year, the subjects of Gerhard Richter's paintings. The search display will show you images of the paintings sourced from the particular Atlas sheet selected (if there are any).

This comprehensive collection of images provides insight into the different paths and ideas that the artist has researched, spanning his process from sketch to the production of the final work. The photographs explore the way in which we see everyday items and the world around us. Select topics include personal and public issues, as well as classic themes—landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, politics, and nature."

One from the archives - Print Offer

I've actually had three different request for this photograph, so I decided to pull out the negative and look at making some new prints.

"Steps - Compton Durville"

This was taken during a standard English downpour in the hamlet of Compton Durville in Somerset, England (click on the image for a bigger version).

And while it is nice in an 8x10 size (actually 6.5x10 ), it looks really good at 11x16, so I am making both sizes available for a change.

(BTW, I've got some very positive responses back from those who have bought earlier prints in these editions - both about the physical prints and about the pictures themselves. I guess nothing beats actually holding a print in your hand...)

This picture is the fifth of the Looking-Glass Edition affordable prints and is available as follows:

11"x16" (edition of 30) @ $75.00 + $14.00 shipping

6.5"x10" (edition of 100) @ $25.00 + $9.50 shipping

Simply click on the correct link below to buy (btw blogger has developed some very weird formatting of late - so please scroll down...):

11"x16" @75.00 (+14.50 s&h)

10"x6.5" @25.00 (+9.50 s&h)

Addendum: William Eggleston, dye-transfer and inkjet

The Eggleston 5x7 post below quoted the following from a review:

"The exhibition features 24 large-format colour photographs, which measure 30x20 inches, and document scenes of day-to-day life in Memphis. All of the images were taken in 1974 but have only recently been printed for the first time...

...It’s very evident to see in these 24 dry transfer prints why the new colour printing process got Eggleston so excited. A dry transfer print is produced from three separate negatives made by photographing the original negative through red, green and blue filters, and the result is a sumptuousness of colour that give the images a remarkable vibrancy."

On which I got an interesting follow up post from Adrian Tyler:

"i was at that show in edinburgh last week and they were *not* dye transfers, they were inkjets, very beautiful at that... "

Now, I should have noticed this (I guess that's what you get for writing posts late at night after you've finally got the kids to bed), but it must be close to impossible to get someone to make 30"x20" dye-transfer prints in this day and age. Interesting that Eggleston now seems to have joined a growing number of colour photographers (see Irving Penn for example) who were at one time enamoured of dye-transfer but who have found inkjet prints apparently gives them both more control and also colour at least as good (and an many cases better) than the lusciousness and vibrancy of dye-transfer.

And apparently a bit of "Egg" on the face of Rose Shillito?

William Eggleston's 5x7 and New American Color Photography

The Guardian has an interesting review of William Eggleston's 5x7 colour work from 1974, currently being shown in conjunction with the Edinburgh Festival.

But before that, as I was reading the review and looking at some of the pictures, a couple of things struck me, especially in conjunction with the ideas in an earlier post about Contemporary American Color Photography.

First, despite the sometimes obviously outdated fashions and hairstyles, I was really struck by how utterly contemporary so many of these pictures look. This is how so much colour photography is done today - and yet Eggleston still seems so often to be head and shoulders above most of the best and the brightest. It's not simply in his uniquely masterful use and understanding of colour, but also in his choice of subject and the way he manipulates it.

Which feeds into the second thing. In responses to Christan Patterson's orignal post about Contemporary American Color Photography, as well as in some responses to mine, there was a thread which went something along the lines of "why should photographers be concerned about tradition, about what has gone before, about what "tradition" you might be working in" - along with a few who claimed it was better for a photographer to ignore such things all together (for fear of visual/conceptual contamination?).

Well, one simple answer to that (and only one) is that if you don't, you can spend an awful lot of time re-inventing the wheel - and when it's finished and you stand back, you realise huh - oval wasn't the best option after all. Someone else figured out round was better 35 years ago. By which I mean: if you browse few a few books by Eggleston and then sit down and look at a lot of what is being touted as the freshest work being done today, it's surprising how much of it looks like early Eggleston - only not quite as good. Sometimes down to almost being a clone.

But back to the review of Eggleston's 5x7 colour work from 1974. As far as I can tell some of these pictures can be found in the book William Eggleston 5x7 (along with the black and white he was doing at the time), but this seems to be the first time they have been printed up for a major show. From the Guardian:

"Memphis1974 and the jukebox is playing Al Green and Isaac Hayes. The girls have feather cuts and the guys wear Burt Reynolds moustaches. It is hot and dark and a swordfish glints from the wall; though dawn is coming up soon, it still feels like midnight in the bar. A little stoned, a little drunk, the revellers give themselves to the lens with the unresisting candour of the weary, yet their faces emerge from the darkness with the unexpected clarity of Dutch portraits.

The sheer grandeur of the photographs in William Eggleston: Portraits 1974(Inverleith House; until 4 October) startle and not simply because these portraits were made - ahead of their times - with a large-format camera. It is more that Eggleston is noted precisely for his level gaze, his democratic lens, for drifting through America shooting everything from roadside graves to low-wattage drugstores with the same dark-adapted eye.

It is all equal to him, or at least he never draws more attention to one subject than another, yet one feels he knows these Memphis folks of old: the sullen belle, the hippy chick, the president of the Singing Cowboy fan club.

He knows and loves their individuality, the way this girl throws her head back to the beat, the way that girl smiles forgivingly at her drunken lover. Outside, and next morning as it seems, the rheumy-eyed preacher stares knowingly off into the blue and Jackie O lives on in the crimplene knock-off dress worn by a housewife passing by.

These portraits are stark but subtle, their spontaneity a result of Eggleston's extreme reticence behind the lens. The format allows for incredible detail - split ends, the down on a teenager's lip, the caking of Max Factor panstick - and for great scale of temperament. Sweetness, deference, defensiveness and spite, too much sun and too much drink before dawn. Eggleston once said he thought of his photographs as 'part of a novel I'm doing' and these people, more than any before or since, seem to be central characters".

and from another review:

The exhibition features 24 large-format colour photographs, which measure 30x20 inches, and document scenes of day-to-day life in Memphis. All of the images were taken in 1974 but have only recently been printed for the first time.

The timing of this body of work is significant for a number of reasons. Just a year before these images were shot, Eggleston had come across a new colour printing technique, which until then had only been used in commercial photography work such as advertising.

The new technique was called dry-transfer printing and as soon as Eggleston saw the depth of colour saturation and quality of the ink that it afforded he was keen to apply it to his own work.

It’s very evident to see in these 24 dry transfer prints why the new colour printing process got Eggleston so excited. A dry transfer print is produced from three separate negatives made by photographing the original negative through red, green and blue filters, and the result is a sumptuousness of colour that give the images a remarkable vibrancy.

The image of a woman standing on a road in a yellow dress is so fresh that it could easily have been taken yesterday, even though the fashion clearly dates it to the early 1970s. The colours are so rich and luxuriously saturated that the dress seems to actually glow – the treatment and texture seem more akin to abstract painting than portrait photography.

Again, in the three-quarter length portrait of a young man in a vivid pink t-shirt, Eggleston has managed to capture this painterly technique really well. Here, the man’s blond wavy hair looks as though it has been applied in a wonderfully free and loose brushstroke. The texture is so feathery and soft that it is hard to believe that this is really a photograph at all.

And if you happen to want the back-story on the picture of the two girls on the couch, you can find it here.

Finally, the William Eggleston Trust has some fascinating things up on the website, such as pages from Eggleston's notebooks, among other things (lots of essays, articles and book intros.):

(1978)